as one of a number of raw episodes in our relationship, most of which had nothing to do with politics. Now, looking again at the history behind the incident, I see more clearly why the opinions I was expressing would have infuriated nearly everyone in my father’s milieu in those days. To me, they were a logical development from the agreed shared ground of democratic liberalism, but to liberals of my father’s generation they were an insolent abrogation of that shared ground. Israel was a just cause and a Jewish cause, those who opposed Israel were anti-semites, and the only Jew who could fail to recognize these truths was a self-hating Jew. Without in the least intending to, I had breached a taboo.
* The leftist Mostel had been named as a Communist to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and appeared before the committee in 1955. He refused to name names or to answer questions about his political activities.
* But it was under his successor, Richard Nixon, that US military support for Israel really expanded, from $76.8 million in 1968 to more than $600 million in 1971. As the Watergate tapes revealed, Nixon regarded Jews with paranoid hostility, and a substantial majority of Jewish voters backed his opponents in both 1968 and 1972. Nixon acted as he did not because of pressure from the Israel lobby but because of his vision of US strategic interests.
4
The Emancipation of the Jews
What is the great task of our age? It is emancipation. Not only that of the Irish, the Greeks, the Frankfurt Jews, the blacks in the West Indies and such oppressed peoples; it is the emancipation of the whole world, especially of Europe, which has come of age and is now tearing itself free from the iron leading-strings of the privileged class, the aristocracy.
Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel1
In Sunday school, we learned about Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, two in a long series of Jewish geniuses, and about Napoleon tearing down the ghetto walls. But overall the story of Jewish emancipation in Europe was sadly neglected. Compared to the saga of Israel or the memory of the shtetl or the progress of the Jews in the USA, not to mention the chronicles of the Bible, it was a footnote. More time was spent on Chasidism than Haskalah. Yet here we were, the beneficiaries of emancipation, Western Jews sitting in a Reform synagogue whose history was inseparable from that development.
In popular Jewish consciousness, Jewish emancipation has steadily lost ground. There are a number of reasons for this. It’s a protracted, fragmented process, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, and for the next 150 years moving in small eddies back and forth across the European continent. There is no emancipation proclamation, no moment of freedom at midnight, no May 15, 1948. Though individual Jews and Jewish groups played a significant role in shaping it, there was no mass Jewish agitation for emancipation until the Bund. The deliverers of Jewish emancipation were wars and revolutions, crises and upheavals in which, for the most part, the Jews themselves played only a marginal role.
The awkward fact about emancipation is that it was always in part a struggle within Jewry, a struggle against Jewish authority, against rabbis, who even in our Reform milieu were treated with a deference that rarely appears in the literature of the Haskalah. Most significantly, emancipation has become tainted by association with “assimilation” and “self-hatred.” The story is not only one of the emancipation of Jews from the legal restraints imposed on them for centuries, but emancipation of Jews from the rule of other Jews, and even sometimes from the constraints of Judaism or Jewishness.
In 1655, even before he’d published a word, Spinoza was accused of heresy (materialism and “contempt for the Torah”), and at the age of twenty-four he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue. Spinoza was the son of Portuguese Jews, a lens grinder who wrote in Latin and spoke Dutch, Hebrew and Ladino, and his view of Jewishness was of a piece with his broader rationalism, with his insistence that “no one is bound to live as another pleases, but is the guardian of his own liberty.” In 1660 the synagogue petitioned the municipal authorities to declare Spinoza a “menace to all piety and morals.” In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, denounced by the Calvinist Church Council as a “work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil,” he argues:
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another only to scoff, I conclude . . . that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.2
Spinoza was one of the first modern critics of scripture, subjecting the Hebrew text to the kind of analysis previously reserved for secular works. “I learnt that the the law revealed by God to Moses was merely the law of the individual Hebrew state, therefore it was binding on none but the Hebrews, and not even on Hebrews after the downfall of their nation.” He was also a pioneering, pre-Freudian student of the emotions, which he identified as the source of human conduct. Above all, he was a stubborn prophet of intellectual freedom. “Religious and political prejudices are the cause of all tyranny,” he wrote. “As a negation of reasonable thoughts, the fruit of a terrible fear, prejudice obliges the people to believe blindly in the tyrant, to adore him as a god.” His studies led him to conclude that “in regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.” As for the Jews, “their continuance so long after dispersion . . . [has] nothing marvellous in it.” They “have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred.”
Moses Mendelssohn was dubbed a “second Spinoza,” but his impact on Jewish—and European—life was much greater. A rabbinical scholar from a humble Yiddish-speaking home in Dessau, he made his way to Berlin and taught himself European culture, mastering German, French, English, Greek and Latin. Under Frederick the Great, Prussia was emerging as an economic, military and intellectual powerhouse, and with the support of elite Christians, Mendelssohn established himself as a renowned essayist and a major theoretician of the German Enlightenment.
Like other advocates of Jewish equality at the time, Mendelssohn saw legal emancipation as going hand in hand with internal reform. He called upon Jews to renounce those customs—notably usury—that gave them a bad name. He belittled Yiddish as a “jargon” that “has contributed more than a little to the uncivilized bearing of the common man,”3 and he urged Jews to speak German, embrace German culture and German patriotism. At the same time he called for and encouraged a revival of classical Hebrew. His German translation of the Hebrew Bible was banned by the rabbis, who also resisted his attempts to reform Jewish education. He argued for an end to the communal and commercial licenses enjoyed by a minority of Jews, but for which the majority took the blame.
Mendelssohn blended caution and boldness. “I am a member of an oppressed people that finds itself compelled to appeal to the good will of the authorities for protection and shelter,” he reminded readers. In 1763 the king granted Mendelssohn, then aged thirty-five, the status of Protected Jew (Schutz-Jude)—under which he was permitted to continue to live and work in Berlin. His discretion and reluctance to engage in full-tilt public combat over the Jews now make him seem, to some, an Uncle Tom, overeager to make concessions to the enemy. But for Mendelssohn, Jewish emancipation—and his own intellectual freedom—required a change in the place of religion in general in society. “I hate all religious disputes, especially those conducted before the eyes of the public,” he explained. “Experience teaches that they are useless. They produce hatred rather than clarification.”4
In 1769 he was called upon to defend and define himself by the Protestant cleric-scientist Johann Kasper Lavater, who
